After light usage over the last few weeks, I’m also keenly aware that Twitter is really not a social network for me anymore- it’s an RSS reader. And it’s become a bit unwieldy for me.

My real friend based social stuff is mainly on Foursquare and Instagram these days.

While I was a little more cryptic in my phrasing, Bryce gets at what I’m starting to feel about Foursquare.

The second post was written by Brenden Mulligan on TechCrunch, and covered why he is finding Path to be different from — and more enjoyable than — many other social networks:

Path. The personal moments of friends experiencing life.

A friend going for a run

A friend checking into the Google Shuttle stop with his girlfriend

A friend arriving in Cambridge, MA

A co-worker checking into our new office

A friend taking her pets to the vet

A friend checking into breakfast (with a comment from his girlfriend attached)

A photo of a friend on a farm in Virginia

A friend waking up in the Mount Tam area

Although the content in Path might seem more monotonous, what makes it really unique is the content is so consistent. It’s all friends sharing experiences. It’s not them sharing what they’ve read, or some photo they found in a magazine, or an article about their company. It’s personal moments.

Mulligan’s list of moments captured on Path, which he describes as having a “consistency of tone” that’s lacking on other services, really struck me. Of the eight listed, seven are definitively tied to location, and the eighth (“a friend going for a run”) could easily have been expressed in terms of location.

I’ve long maintained that data is key for Foursquare, and when they released the “explore” feature earlier this year it was the fulfillment of a feature request I’ve been begging for, for as long as I can remember: when I’m stranded in midtown, I can find a meal or cup of coffee based on where people I trust have visited. This is huge. Individual checkins are tiny and ephemeral — but a few years of checkins from food, coffee, and beer geeks? That’s a bigass coral reef of useful data, built through slow accretion.

But the latest release of the foursquare app does something a little different. The pictures, notes, and comments associated with each checkin are much more prominent — and (in my experience, at least) that means that more people are adding these elements. The experience is distinctly richer, in a way I didn’t expect and didn’t think I’d care about…but I do.

What Mulligan enjoys about Path is what I an starting to enjoy about Foursquare. Pictures from a friend’s trip through his childhood haunts on the Jersey shore, comments on the current menu at a favorite restaurant…my Foursquare dashboard is becoming something of substance.

And in my view, Foursquare comes with two meaningful bonus features. The first is obvious: I still get all that tasty, tasty data, packaged up all nice and neat.

The second is a little more abstract, but no less important in these social-app-filled days. Path asks me to decide who my 50 “important” people are. It’s a list that I have to actively manage based on criteria that can be both fluid and uncomfortably personal. For me that’s simply a headache. With Foursquare, I’ve got a simple decision: am I comfortable with this person knowing where I am? Would I be annoyed/upset/afraid if they showed up at this bar? Minimal cognitive friction.

Foursquare may not be limited to my “most important” people, but I see that as a benefit. I’m getting a wonderful little peek into the lives of people whose company I enjoy even if we’re not — or not yet — close friends.

I think that Foursquare has done a better job of fulfilling its potential that most other recent companies I can think of, and in this case it was potential I didn’t even realize they had.

The Foursquare crew has tricked us into giving them a massive and fascinating data set once before, by making it seem all “fun” and “engaging” to do so. Fair warning: it seems entirely possible that they’re doing it again.